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EXECUTION: THE DISCIPLINE OF GETTING THINGS DONE

The book that shows how
to get the job done and deliver results . . . whether you’re running an entire
company or in your first management job.Execution is a discipline and integral to strategy.

Execution is the major
job of the business leader.

Execution must be a core
element of an organisation’s culture.

Much has been written
about Jack Welch’s style of management—specially his toughness and bluntness,
which some people call ruthlessness. He forced realism into all of GE’s
management processes, making it a model of execution culture.

After a
long, stellar career with General Electric, Larry Bossidy transformed
AlliedSignal into one of the world’s most admired companies and was named CEO
of the year in 1998 by Chief Executive magazine.

In July
2001 Larry Bossidy was asked by the board of directors of Honeywell
International (it had merged with AlliedSignal) to return and get the company
back on track. He’s been putting the ideas he writes about in Execution to work in real time.

Typically
the CEO and his senior management team allot less than half a day each year to
review the plans—people, strategy and operations. Typically too the reviews are
not particularly interactive. People sit passively watching PowerPoint
presentations. They don’t ask questions.

They don’t
debate, and as a result they don’t get much useful outcome. People leave with
no commitments to the action plans they have helped create. This is a formula
for failure.

Only a
leader can ask tough questions that everyone needs to answer. Dialogue is the
core of culture and basic unit of work. How people talk to each other will
determine how well organisation will function.

Is the
dialogue stilted, politicised, fragmented and butt-covering?

Far too
many leaders avoid debating about people openly in group settings. That’s no
way to lead.

Micromanaging
is a big mistake. It diminishes people’s self confidence, saps their initiative
and stifles their ability to think for themselves.

But there
is enormous difference between leading an organisation and presiding over it.
The leader who executes often does not even have to tell people what to do; she
asks questions so they can figure out what they need to do. In this way she
coaches them, passing on her experience as a leader and educating them to think
in ways they never thought before.

All
leaders like Jack, Sam and Herb are good communicators but communication can be
more boilerplate, or it can mean something.

All these
leaders practice ‘management by walking around’. They are passionate about
getting results. These leaders energise by the example they set.

Even at
the end of his career, Jack was not presiding. He was leading by being actively
involved.

Execution
has to be embedded in the reward systems and in the norms of behaviour that
everyone practices. One way get a handle on execution is to think of it as akin
to the six sigma processes for continual improvement. People practicing this methodologies look for
deviations from desired tolerances.

Like six
sigma, the discipline of execution doesn’t work unless people are schooled in it
and practice it constantly. It does not work if only a few people in the system
practice it.

The real
problem is that execution just doesn’t sound very sexy. It’s the stuff a leader
delegates.

Nobel
Prize winners succeed because they execute the details of a proof that other
people can replicate, verify, or do something with. They test and discover
patterns, connections and linkages that nobody saw before.

“Unless I
make this plan happen, it’s not going
to matter. “ But the selection, training and development of leaders doesn’t
focus on this reality.

Leaders
are articulate conceptualisers, very good at grasping strategies and explaining
them. They are not interested in “how” of getting things done; that’s for
somebody else to think about.

Many
don’t realise what needs to be done to convert a vision into specific tasks,
because their high-level thinking is too broad. They don’t follow through and
get things done; the details bore them. They don’t crystallise thoughts or
anticipate roadblocks.

Leader’s communications
are just not down to earth messages but a tool for changing attitudes. They
made the company goals, issues and new leadership style clear to the employees.
The talk is straightforward, even blunt, designed to elicit truth and coach
people in the behaviour Leader expects his managers. “Intense candour”, Dick
Brown, CEO of EDS calls it, “a balance of optimism and motivation with realism.

THE LEADER’S SEVEN ESSENTIAL BEHAVIOURS.

What
exactly does a leader who’s in charge of execution do? How does he keep from
being a micromanager, caught up in the details of running the business?

1.Know
your people and your business.

2.Insist
on realism.

3.Set
clear goals and priorities.

4.Follow
through.

5.Reward
the doers.

6.Expand
people’s capabilities.

7.Know
yourself.

When
going to meet people, prepare well. Learn about stars and set up time with
them. Acknowledge their good work and Leave them with a couple of thoughts she
didn’t have.

Larry asked
why his quality staff reported to manufacturing. “That’s like putting the fox
in charge of guarding the chicken coop.” He wanted quality to analyse
manufacturing.

INSIST ON REALISM

Realism
is the heart of execution, but many organisations are full of people who are
trying avoiding or shading reality. Why? It makes life uncomfortable. People
don’t want to open Pandora’s Box. They want to hide mistakes, or buy time to
figure out a solution rather than admit they don’t have an answer at the
moment. They want to avoid confrontations. Nobody wants to be the messenger who
gets shot or the troublemaker, who challenges the authority of her superiors. Sometimes
the leaders are simply in denial.

Was it
realistic for AT&T to acquire a bunch of cable businesses it didn’t know
how to run? The record shows it wasn’t. Was it realistic for Richard Thoman to
simultaneously launch two sweeping initiatives at Xerox without being able to
install the critical leaders? Clearly not.

How do
you make realism a priority?You start
by being realistic yourself. Then you make sure realism is the goal of all
dialogues in the organisation.

SET CLEAR GOALS AND PRIORITIES

A leader
who says, “I have got tem priorities” does not know what he is talking about—he
doesn’t know himself what the most important things are. Set clear and simple
goals.

FOLLOW THROUGH

Clear and
simple goals mean nothing if nobody takes them seriously. The failure to follow
through is widespread in business, and a major cause of poor execution.

REWARD THE DOERS

If you
want people to produce specific results, you reward them accordingly.

EXPAND PEOPLE’S CAPABILITIES THRPUGH COACHING

The most
effective way to coach is to observe a person in action and then provide
specific useful feedback.

The skill
of the coach is the art of questioning. Asking incisive questions forces people
to think, to discover, to search.

•Are
deeply involved in all aspects of their area … curious … tireless … never finish a conversation without summarizing
the actions to be taken.

•Are decisive on tough issues:“Some leaders simply do not have the
emotional fortitude to confront the tough ones.When they don’t, everybody in the business knows they are wavering,
procrastinating, and avoiding reality.”(See Good to Great.)

•Get things done through others:
Workaholics who micromanage can’t cut it in the long run.Neither can hands-off and big-picture-only
folks.

•Follow-through:Ensure that people do what they committed to
per time-table.Synchronize through
specificity.When circumstances de-rail
the train, move quickly to lay alternative tracks.

NEVER FINISH A MEETING WITHOUT:

◦What’s
to be done

◦By
whom

◦When
and how

◦With
what resources

◦When,
how, and with whom to be reviewed.

•Never launch an initiative
without personal commitment to follow through until it is simply part of “how
we do things.”

HOW TO GET THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN THE RIGHT JOBS:

•Focus on
what they did and why (priority setting)

•Does she
naturally focus on the people who were assigned to her and how they contributed
to the result?

•Does her
career history, from school on, give evidence or energy, enthusiasm, and a
delight in accomplishments?(You can know this when you do CIDS
interviewing)

•Does she
tend to wander into strategy and theory repeatedly?

•Did he
meet commitments in ways that strengthened or weakened the people involved and
the organization as a whole?

•VERIFY.PERSONALLY.WITH REFERENCES YOU KNOW.

“Nowhere is candid
dialogue more important than in the people process.If people can't speak forthrightly when
evaluating others, then the evaluation is worthless – to the organization and
to the person who needs the feedback?”

KNOW YOURSELF

Everyone
pays lip service to the idea that leading an organisation requires strength of
character. In execution it’s absolutely critical. You need ‘emotional
fortitude’ to be honest in thought, action and belief.

Psychologists
know that some people are limited, even crippled, by emotional blockages that
prevent them from doing things that leadership requires. Such blockages may
lead them to avoid unpleasant situations by ducking conflicts, procrastinations
on decisions, or delegating with no follow –through.

Emotional
Fortitude comes from self-discovery and self-mastery.

Leaders
know intuitively that they have a problem and will often acknowledge it as well
but alarmingly majority of them do not do anything to fix the problem.

At Baxter
International, for example, HR is central both to a rigorous process of
assessing, developing, and promoting people and to the company’s strategic
planning. They established teams to flesh out the details of exactly what was
needed, what capabilities they had and what they needed to do to fill the gap.

THE SOCIAL SOFTWARE OF EXECUTION

Organizational Hardware:

•Organizational Structure

•Design of rewards

•Compensation and sanctions

•Financial reports and their
flow

•Communication systems

•Hierarchical distribution of
power

◦Assignment
of tasks

◦Budget
level approvals

Social Software:

•Values

•Beliefs

•Norms of behaviour

•Everything else that isn’t
hardware

YOU CAN ALSO READ THIS…LARRY’S LEGACY CONTINUES AT
HONEYWELL.

CEO of the Year 2013

David M. Cote, Chairman
and CEO, Honeywell

"David took on an enormous
challenge and just hit it out of the park, creating one Honeywell.He's often said the trick is in the doing and
David has done it, both internally at the company and externally in the strong
statesman role he's playing to help our country."

- Jim
Turley, Chairman and CEO, Ernst and Young and 2013 CEO of the Year selection
committee member

Chief Executive Magazine’s “CEO of the Year,”
award recognizes an outstanding corporate leader nominated and selected by
peers. Under Dave’s leadership for more than a decade, Honeywell has:

•
Increased sales by 71% to $37.7 billion

•
Increased EPS* by 197% to $4.48

•
Delivered a total shareowner return of 240%, consistently outperforming the
S&P 500

• Transformed
Honeywell into a global company, with 54% of sales coming from outside the
U.S.Versus 41% 10 years ago

• Oversaw
more than 75 acquisitions and 50 divestitures

(Nominations
for CEO of the Year were garnered from Chief Executive Magazine’s 124,000
readers. The ten most frequently cited nominations were evaluated and a winner
was voted upon by a peer Selection Committee consisting of CEOs from leading
global corporations. )

The Leadership Behaviours of “One Hon”

To fix
Honeywell’s fragmented culture, David Cote identified 12 key behaviours that
ultimately became the basis of the Honeywell Operating System—more colloquially
known as One Hon:

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